Elaboration Versus Construction

"How about this," I ventured. "In the Rational Unified Process, the middle two steps, Elaboration and Construction, take most of the time.^[10] I can see commitment-based schedules during Construction, when we have a pretty good handle on what we are doing. But I'm still having a problem during Elaboration, where there is still a lot of discovery and risk."

^[10] Recall that the four phases are Inception, Elaboration, Construction, and Transition.

"Good point," admitted Roscoe. "Let's start with Construction. Even there we still miss wildly today because of missed commitments, so nailing that down will certainly improve our performance. Point taken.

"And, by the way, I suspect that the reason so many Construction commitments are missed is that the tasks were poorly estimated during Elaboration. Missing lots of commitments during Construction is usually a sure symptom that we closed off Elaboration prematurely, perhaps because we were date-driven. We pay the piper in the next phase, of course.

"But," he continued, "let's go back to Elaboration. We still need to do a better job of scoping and estimating the research and discovery tasks which, I will remind you, can all be broken down into smaller subtasks, each with less uncertainty and susceptible to a better estimate.

"And, in fact, we do need commitments to hard dates during Elaboration, because we need a forcing function to get decisions made. Otherwise, we study the problem endlessly. Committing to a date to make a decision on some risky item is a good thing. It focuses the effort and makes sure we get closure."

I was out of counterarguments. As usual, Roscoe had thought six moves ahead, not two.